Sophie Scott

Even slapstick humor, which is much more broad in its reach.

There'll be somebody somewhere going, that's not funny.

My brother died that way.

So I don't try to get people laughing nowadays when I'm doing things in the lab.

I don't bother trying to use humor at all.

What we use are videos of normally television presenters who get the giggles while they're broadcasting.

And they have to keep talking because they're on air.

And that's actually very effective because that just leans into the fact that laughter is highly contagious.

A lot of the laughter we produce is happening just because we've heard or seen somebody else laughing.

And if you watch a video of somebody desperately trying to do a broadcast while they're really trying not to laugh, the laughter keeps coming through.

there's strong clues that that's spontaneous laughter, that is authentic laughter, but also they're desperately trying to cover it up, which makes it almost funnier than if they just started laughing.

So that works very, very well to get people laughing.

And it doesn't require you to find anything funny and it doesn't require you to know any of the people involved.

So a lot of the ones we use are actually from the US.

So the people in the UK don't know who those people are, but they still laugh when they start laughing.

Are people who laugh a lot happier?

Yeah.

Very, very hard to know.

So everybody underestimates how often they laugh.

There aren't many studies on this, but every study that has got people to give a rating of how often they laugh and then actually observes them, finds that everybody is under-reporting their laughter.